Jack Tramiel, who has died aged 83, was, as the founder of Commodore
computers, every bit as important as Apple’s Steve Jobs in ushering in the
digital information age.

Born Idek Trzmiel on December 13 1928 in the Polish city of Lodz, he was almost 11 when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. Confined to a ghetto, he and his family were eventually shipped to Auschwitz in August 1944.

His mother was transferred to Terezin and survived the war. But he and his father were transported to the Ahlem slave labour camp in Hanover, Germany. By the time American troops liberated him in April 1945, Idek’s father was dead, probably murdered by being injected with petrol.

After the war, Tramiel spent two years in Germany, where he married a fellow concentration camp survivor, before leaving to start a new life in America in November 1947. He arrived in New York City with $10.

After Anglicising his name he joined the US Army, where he learned how to fix office equipment, a skill he used in 1953 – after a spell working as a taxi driver – to start his own typewriter repair business. In 1955, keen to further his business ambitions, the cost-conscious entrepreneur moved from New York to Toronto to found his typewriter manufacturer, Commodore Business Machines.

An intense and demanding leader, Tramiel built a reputation as a tough businessman who regarded business as war. By the early 1960s his uncompromising style had turned Commodore into a stockmarket-listed manufacturer of all kinds of office equipment, and a decade later Commodore had established itself as a leading maker of digital calculators.

But when its main supplier of calculator parts, Texas Instruments, started making its own calculators at a price Commodore could not match, Tramiel found himself in trouble. He decided to sell a large stake in Commodore to investor Irving Gould and bought the microchip manufacturer MOS Technology. The move led Tramiel into the embryonic home computer business, after MOS Technology’s Chuck Peddle persuaded him that Commodore should launch a desktop computer.

Initially Commodore looked at buying Apple, which was still a garage-based business at the time. But after Jobs demanded $100,000 for the firm, Tramiel decided Commodore should design its own computer. The result, the Commodore PET, launched in January 1977 a few months before the Apple II, making it the first mass-produced home computer. It became a success particularly in the educational and business markets.

It was the million-selling VIC-20, the follow-up to the PET, with which Tramiel really made his mark. Designed around Tramiel’s belief in creating computers “for the masses, not the classes”, the machine was priced at a significant discount to its rivals, sparking a price war that forced down the cost of computing. The company’s next computer, the Commodore 64, cemented Tramiel’s victories by becoming one of the biggest selling computer models of all time.

Despite his success Tramiel was ousted from the firm he had founded in January 1984, after clashing with Gould. But he was not out of the business for long and by the end of that year he had staged a comeback by buying the computer and game console divisions of Atari.

The following year he launched the Atari ST, a line of colour computers offering the point-and-click interface of the monochrome Apple Macintosh at a fraction of the price. Though successful in Europe, the Atari ST failed to repeat the success of the Commodore 64, and as the 1990s progressed Atari lost out to Windows PCs. After an unsuccessful attempt to compete with Sega, Sony and Nintendo in the games console business, Tramiel sold the company in 1996 and retired.

Tramiel was a keen funder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which he helped found in 1993. In 2005 he made a large donation in tribute to Vernon Tott, the American soldier who had liberated him from Ahlem 50 years previously.